Essays & Interviews
Against performativity
Biological science must reconcile itself with trans existence. Hodder reminds us that the purpose of dialectical materialism is not simply to recognise what exists, but ‘to recognise it in order to change it’, and we are already changing sex and gender, without Judith Butler opening the door for us.
StudyTube and the fetishisation of productivity
During a global pandemic that is exposing the contradictions of global capitalism, StudyTube instead re-frames this as an opportunity to accelerate one’s own productive potential. Ruby Granger, it seems, is committed to going down with the ship of capitalist realism, even as its edifice begins to crumble around her.
Mark Fisher in postmodernity
Though Fisher uses the concept ‘capitalist realism’ with the hope of coming out the other side of postmodernism, he succumbs to its ambiguities and false genealogies as it fetishises what is new; the USSR becomes identical to the US and European powers, and Marx, Lenin, and Stalin become dead white men who may as well be T.E. Lawrence.
After ethical consumption
In buying Fair Trade, Apple Red, Nike, or Gillette products, for example, we are still really only seeking to exculpate ourselves from an evil we can never escape, whose taint will always be branded on our souls. Oddly enough, this is not too far from the approach of the resurgent fascist right, which attempts to justify the present evil by leaning into it.
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